Archive for ‘February, 2015’

I can’t see the TV from where my computer is right now, but my roommate is watching John From Cincinnati and I’m listening along, and a lot of things about the show are much clearer when it’s taken just verbally.

One is that the show uses barely any music, but the music it uses is amazing.

Two is that this is definitely a sitcom.

An old man’s need to sleep with young women is pretty mercilessly skewered in this show. This is contrasted with all the very real needs for redemption that surround him: Vietnam Joe and his poisonous story, Butchie and his heroin habit, Brucie and the ghost. Maybe it’s because Mitch is the only one, of all these people, who does not have any real problems.

Cass is a pretty interesting character.

Now that I know Kai and Sean are both non-actors their performances seem much more interesting and magical. They don’t come across as non-actors, they come across as normal people who don’t talk as fast.

The middle of the season is some sort of peak of television. I just can’t believe how well written it is. I just noticed that Kai gets maneuvered into standing there holding a loaded gun behind her back through the whole scene when Sean’s mom gets to see him for the first time. Absolutely amazing.

Watching “Rope.” There’s a reason why everybody who watches this movie describes it as a movie that is not worth watching. By never cutting the camera ever they manage to make the whole thing seem like a high school play. Maybe it’s the dramatic artifice that they use — two guys kill a guy and then have a dinner party with his corpse under the dinner table, one of the murderers keeps acting creepier and creepier and the other one’s feeling guilty. It’s a good idea, I guess, sort of interesting, but their attempts to turn up the heat are like a slipped screw.

It’s an experiment that failed. It is interesting in how boring it is. I’m glad that they released it so you can see why nobody has ever tried it again.

That’s what you really wanted to know, right? Why is he a great artist? Because it used to be that, if you were an artist and you wanted to eat and live indoors, you had to paint stuff like this:

And Picasso came along and said, no, you can still make a living and all you have to do is this:

and do just as well, reach as many people, live just as good a life.

This isn’t a facile thing, and it isn’t a small thing. It is literally genius. When we say “Picasso invented a new way of seeing,” it’s sort of true. But it’s sort of not. He emphasized different bits of seeing than we’re used to. But Picasso’s desire to see and depict multiple angles of something is nothing new. The modern example of the desire to see all angles that we’re probably most familiar with is bad comic book art, where the artist wants to depict the female breast and the female butt at the same time:

That is technically an expression of the same impulse that fueled cubism, though Picasso was interested in more academic things and these artists are interested in boobs and butts.

This is also true of the glossy fancy art of Picasso’s day, by the way, but if I tried to show you one of the zillion naked-nymph paintings that festooned the walls of a hundred years ago you’d be distracted by the quality of the painting and miss the fact that it’s anatomically implausible. We’ll get back to that point in a minute.

The more you learn about art, the more you realize that we’ve all been doing cubism all along, and Picasso just chose to emphasize something interesting about the way we all see. So he didn’t invent a new way of seeing, he picked something unusual about the common experience of seeing that he wanted to explore. But that’s not the most important part of what he did.

The most important thing he did was create a market.

I’ll explain that two ways. The first is abstract, the second is horrifyingly concrete.

Here’s the abstract: a “new way of seeing” is not enough by itself. It must be communicated to the public at large, or it is meaningless. If Picasso had painted the exact same paintings, never showed a soul a single one, and burnt them at his death without ever another eye laid upon them, they would have been robbed of practically all value. It would be as if the pictures were only seen by a dead eye. But he made that essential connection to the species at large, and we all saw it. It is not enough for the eye to see — it must tell the brain. Picasso managed to tell the brain.

Here is the horrifyingly concrete way:

Artists have to eat. Have to. If they don’t, they die. Once they die, they stop painting, they are no longer artists. Art only exists so long as it is fed. Most people don’t realize that about us artists, but it’s true.

Before Picasso, if you wanted to be an artist you had to do it a certain way. Glossy neoclassical characters or brilliant perspective paintings were the only way. Everything must be polished. No others need apply.

Now, that stuff is difficult, true. But the main reason it’s difficult is because it’s time-consuming. Painting an enormous battle scene or a nymph bathing in winter sunlight takes a long, long time.

Artists have been having interesting thoughts like Picasso’s for centuries. But they always had to contain those thoughts within the forests and the nymphs that they absolutely had to paint. You could think all you wanted to about sight and shape, but you had to code it in portraits of rich men and their dogs or you did not get to express it. All your hip new ideas about perspective and point of view have to be translated into the metaphors of genre. This takes a long time. It’s hard work.

Picasso found a way to take this economical, specialized, and abstract form of art and turn it into MONEY. Lots and lots of money. FAST.

He was not just famous — he was one of the people who pioneered the 20th century idea of celebrity.

Not only that, he made it okay to not have to polish things at all! It was like selling the idea of the thing. Something that would have barely been a joke twenty years ago could now be sold for enough to support you and your family for a year.

So now you can do this! We can all do this. We are no longer slaves to Jesus, seascapes, and Roman ruins. Everybody everywhere gets to paint like Picasso now!

Can you imagine the revolution this sparked?

Like Mozart freed the musicians, Picasso freed the artists of the world, and he did it with money and fame.

…and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of my favorite movies have been described as “incredibly pretentious” that I actually search for that keyword, but I digress…

But the borders between real and imaginary are permeable, and I find that fascinating. One of the things I liked best about True Detective is the attention to the idea of shared hallucination and what profound fiction experiences mean in this world of CGI. There was lots and lots of CGI in True Detective, though few people noticed it, because it was mostly used for too-perfect reflections as they drove around in their greenscreen car. But that’s a large part of what the show was about — what consensual hallucination, catharsis, faith, and fiction mean in the modern day. The stories we tell ourselves are the masks we wear, and perhaps Rust wears no mask, but perhaps there is more to it than that. The vortex in Carcosa was not unique to Rust. He was not the first to see it, and if the story is to be believed he will not be the last. Even though it’s made out of bad meth and acid and human suffering and it doesn’t “exist” in any sense you can point to, a lot of people in the show saw it, so it’s sort of real. The audience can’t appreciate it, because we were expecting spectacle and what we got was birds flying in a spiral and a cool-looking karma tornado. In order to understand it we have to make that leap to the character’s minds, to see that to them it is real.

I’m interested in the way that, though Jack Kirby died in 1994, his characters live on so strongly that they suffered a collective nervous breakdown in 2007, provoked by George Bush and what he did to American identity. It happened during a Marvel crossover event called “The Civil War;” look it up. Practically no Kirby character survived that story without major changes and/or death. and then were reborn on the movie screen as the biggest franchise the world has ever seen, fresh and new and mysteriously more like themselves than ever. I’m interested in the way that his greatest enemy/collaborator, Stan Lee, has been mysteriously transformed by time into a living Kirby character who must do battle with Stan Lee Media Inc., a corporate entity that has divested itself of ol’ Stan and now battles him for copyrights, those worthless-but-incredibly-valuable paper leashes on characters that he never created but chose to claim.

101 Dalmatians is a hilarious romp, on the one hand. On the other, it’s a love letter to 1950s design aesthetics and one of the most beautiful animated films I’ve ever seen. It’s also partially responsible for people not wearing fur any more, because Cruella DeVille is one of the meanest bad guys ever and she’s running a puppy mill right there in a Disney movie; it’s pretty grim. I think it had an impact.

I think the Fisher King had an impact too. It humanized the homeless. Maybe that made a difference. One thing I know that it did for sure was immortalize a certain time period in New York City history. It’s a love letter, a document of the way it was at the end of the 80s, right before Giuliani choked it to death with dollar bills, and it is very accurate and very honest and very, very true. They bring to life the AIDS epidemic, the terrors of Central Park at night, the lost era when regular human beings still lived on Manhattan Island.

I have finished all my commissions! Hurray! And now to not do any more commissions for a while, I think, I hope, because I am too far behind on my own work. This next little stretch of Feief is gonna be interesting. Not as much background work as usual — once I establish three locations (one of which is incredibly important) I’m done.

I’ve been trying to actually listen to my entire music collection. You might not know it now, but I was one of those guys in the 90s who owned more than a thousand CDs. I think I got close to 2000 by the end. And I’d listened to at least two thirds of them.
I love to consume music. I prefer to have the music on my computer, where I can get to it, instead of streaming. I don’t like Pandora or other online radios….I don’t even like regular radios. I like to hear new music and draw it back into my lair, where I can mess with it. I’m known to open up the file and edit out long silences or change the levels, if it’s a song that I really like that’s too loud or too quiet.

Thank god, thank god, after a year this commission is over. I had so much fun and I learned so much, but a year is a long time to have one piece hanging over your head.

At least it was a pretty good commission.

I’ll do a big post in a few days that sums up the whole piece, because it turned out pretty well and I’d like to revisit it. Let me talk to the person who asked me to do it and see what they have planned.

It’s a fairy tale about modern labor relations, and the moral is “If you do a good job we will let your mom out of jail.” It was made during a vicious animator’s strike at Disney, which is why it’s short, and the people who finished the film were the ones who Disney didn’t fire for trying to unionize.

The clown scene in silhouette, where they’re drunk as skunks and talking about going to ask the boss for a raise, was animated by two union organizers who left immediately afterwards. It’s a rather pointed dialogue, if you notice.

Absolutely gorgeous concept painting for Dumbo.

The clown scene ends with the spilling of champagne in the water bucket, and this causes the Pink Elephant sequence. It ends with Dumbo up the tree, having flown for the first time. That is a shamanic journey, my friend. Not just for Dumbo, either, but for our whole society.

I’ll point out that LSD was actually invented in 1943, and Dumbo came out in 1941. This is a pre-LSD society that came up with Pink Elephants. That fact continually blows my mind.

People who dismiss the crows as racist caricatures are missing the fact that nearly every single character is black. The elephants are explicitly juxtaposed with the faceless black circus workers during the tent-raising scene, and it can’t be overlooked that Dumbo is an African elephant born to an Indian elephant. The animators who were still working at Disney were examining their perceptions of the black experience in America in the 1940s, comparing it to their own experience and the compromises that they were having to make to stay employed at Disney, and expressing it through one of the saddest and most harrowing tales about employment that America has ever produced.

By the end of the film, Dumbo has given up. He will never be free. He tried on a number of identities, including the alcoholic and the clown, and none of them were functional. The crows have taught him how to fly, but he does not use that to escape. Instead, he stays at the circus, and trades his labor for his mother’s freedom.

It is presented as a happy ending.

I’d wager that the animators that stayed behind at Disney were, generally, the ones with families to support.

A few facts about Walt Disney:

1. He was from Kansas City, where he grew up very poor. It’s fair to surmise he knew a fair number of black people, though I don’t have any way to confirm that.
2. His father was a good-for-nothing socialist who would steal his own children’s money and had a fierce temper. (Just to be clear, I’m a socialist too, I’m not putting socialism down, I’m saying Elias Disney does not appear to have been a good father or a good provider but he appears to have been a real loudmouth socialist caricature). He was such a genius that he tried to make a living as an orange grower in western Kansas. Have you ever been to western Kansas? It wouldn’t take much sense to know that made no sense.
3. After Disney’s enormous success in the late 1930s, he bought his parents a house. The house had a gas leak and killed his mother almost immediately, in 1938. His father died shortly thereafter, during the production of Disney and the artist’s strike, in 1941.